Welsh Journals

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THE DISTRIBUTION OF WELSH SPEAKERS, 1961 1981. HAROLD CARTER Carter, Harold 1985: The Distribution of Welsh Speakers, 1961 1981. Cambria 13 (1) pp. 101 to pp. 108. Part III of Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. Far too many studies of language change have focussed only upon percentage distributions. This exploratory analysis of the changes in the numbers able to speak Welsh between 1961 and 1981 is used to produce a map of Wales showing six categories of change with a commentary on their distribution. Harold Carter, Dept. of Geography, Llandinam Building, University College of Wales, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, Wales, U.K. SY23 3DB. Studies of the distribution of the Welsh language have appeared consistently since the census first provided the necessary data from J.E. Southall in the 1890's (Southall 1895) to the present (Aitchison and Carter 1985). Emrys Bowen himself contributed to those studies (Bowen and Carter 1975) and frequently used the geography of the language in his writing on Wales, most pertinently in his presidential address to the Institute of British Geographers (Bowen 1959). Changes in the areal extent of Welsh at successive censuses are of intrinsic interest as evidence both of the fortunes of the language and, more broadly, of the phenomenon of interest widely characteristic of the minority languages of Europe (Stephens 1978). But.language analysis has more significance in that, together with religion, language constitutes a central symbol of culture (Carter and Thomas 1969) and carries therefore much wider implications: for it is indicative of the status of minority cultures in the contemporary world. Once the conjunction of language and culture is given priority then the most significant aspect to be mapped tends to be dominance as measured by the proportion of the total population speaking the language and not the absolute numbers. However such maps carry major drawbacks and, indeed, can be completely misleading. This is correspondingly true of maps which represent percentage change between census (the percentage change in Welsh speakers) or percentage difference between censuses (the difference in the percentages speaking Welsh out of the total population). The major problems relate to the fact that very high percentages can be based on very small totals and, in consequence, so can change and difference. In Wales a simple